Abstraction

Brian Dupont reviews an exhibition of new work by Wade Guyton at Petzel Gallery, New York, on view through February 22, 2014.

Dupont writes that all of Guyton's paintings "function as wry comments on their own making, existing both as paintings and 'paintings'; the level of quotation and reserve would seem to preclude Guyton from risking failure on the messy and labor intensive investigation that might lead to a new body of work, a new approach, or a new idea. Instead, Guyton has chosen to focus on the quotation marks, using the paintings as a lens to focus in on the environment and act of looking at the paintings. ... These compositional strategies draw parallels to Richard Serra’s use of steel plates as a way to measure and change the gallery space via mass. The surface similarities of steel and printed linen are superficially similar, and while Guyton’s use of black and white achieves a level of austerity that Serra might envy, he doesn’t affect the space in the same way... Guyton’s paintings lack Serra’s attention to inherent tension, the black rectangles’ measures are arbitrary and don’t push back against the viewer or the space. Just as the final two paintings at the Whitney measured the walls between Breuer’s iconic window without doing much else, these chart a space that is primarily notable for its blankness."

Butler writes: "The Casualist impulse has yielded compositionally awkward work that may seem humble and self-deprecating, and may employ 'hobbyist' pre-fab materials like pre-stretched canvases and canvas board. Though often small in scale, the work might spill into three dimensions because the stretchers and support aesthetically loom just as large as the paint itself. The most compelling Casualist work has an anti-heroic, offhand feel and ostensibly shows little attention to craft or detail... Casualist pieces seem quickly made, self-amused, and untethered to the rigorously structured propositions and serial strategies favored by artists of previous eras. This is not to say that the new approach is unserious or heedless of art’s history and evolution. But it embraces and memorializes unpredictable encounters in the studio in ways that their predecessors did not, and may regard the traditional avenue of creating a brand and working it for forty years as unadventurous. By integrating painting – a traditional form – with a more improvisational and conceptual contemporary sensibility, Casualism presents a principled alternative that stretches and even distorts traditional boundaries but does not ignore them."

Caleb De Jong reviews an exhibition of works by Julije Knifer at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, on view through March 15, 2014.

De Jong writes: "Beginning in the early 1960s Knifer reduced his compositions to a form he termed the ‘meander’, which were maze like forms made with a restrictive palette of black and white and earth tones. Similar to his artistic counterparts in America who saw their art as an affront to capitalist excess, Knifer saw his practice as a spiritual challenge to the reigning orthodoxy of his socialist milieu... Similar to other painters who have taken a conceptual approach to the medium such as On Kawara and Roman Opalka, Knifer's painting approach is an extended meditation on time. By focusing so clearly on his 'meander' form, Knifer eliminates all externalities and instead demarcates the present-ness of the action of making the object. In turn, the viewer is made aware of their own relationship towards time through an elimination of distraction and romantic posturing. All that is left is your awareness towards form and attention."

Pocaro writes: "What we are witnessing with the ascendancy of provisional or DIY abstraction is simply the widespread institutionalization of the 'poseur' mentality as a viable art-making strategy. It’s a mindset that values the idea of being a painter and the sociological approach adopted in the studio far more than the arduous reality of making good paintings, or even of the painting itself. While it may be true that, as Walter Darby Bannard has said 'there is no sweat equity in art' surely there should at least be some sweat? ...Today, 'artist' is just another option on a buffet of available lifestyle choices that emphasize style not substance. Not nearly thoughtful enough to be conceptual, nor skillful enough to be aesthetically captivating, provisional painting falls harmlessly and lifelessly in the middle. Easy enough for anyone to make, It’s the ultimate peoples’ art with a decidedly American flavor... The heyday of abstract painting as a cultural force is well and truly over. There are no longer any significant cultural-aesthetic resistances against which to assert an individual stylistic vision and as a result, making bad painting doesn’t look revolutionary, it just looks bad."

In 2012, Carol Diehl wrote: "Takenaga’s work has been described as psychedelic, but that implies a loss of control, where these paintings are the result of acute attention. While they no doubt owe much to the precedents of Op art and Pattern and Decoration, Takenaga’s repetitive forms, like Ross Bleckner’s, inspire more mystical interpretation... Takenaga’s paintings portray matter and energies beyond what we know, beyond the everyday world. Whether we look inward with a microscope or outward with a telescope, systems are at work that we can barely comprehend, and of which we are a very small part. Her depictions of these systems can be seen as cold and threatening or exuberantly optimistic."

Jennifer Samet interviews painter Ryan Cobourn about his work. Cobourn's exhibition I've Been Wrong Before is currently on view Bryant Street Gallery in Palo Alto, CA (through February 28) and his work was recently on view at Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York.

Cobourn comments: "Cézanne was about fitting things in together. I’m interested in that too. People would probably be surprised to see how I paint. I start very slowly and deliberately and build it up into those forms. And they start crashing into each other. They’re a lot less gestural than people might think. I’m more focused on color and form and tight construction... Yes. That is the other problem with contemporary painting. A lot of people know how to make the image, but they don’t know how to make the thing... I want to make a painterly equivalent. I want them to look visceral and felt and lush. Because that is lacking in contemporary art. I remember early on, having this idea of what I wanted a painting to look like that I wasn’t seeing in the galleries. That’s why I make the stuff I make. I was interested in this idea of gestural paintings that are not systematic."

Julie L Belcove profiles painter Jasper Johns on the occasion of the upcoming exhibition Jasper Johns: Regrets at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on view beginning March 15, 2014.

The show will feature John's newest paintings "paintings and works on paper, predominantly in greys and blacks, all riffing on the same image of a man sitting, with one leg tucked under him, on an old-fashioned iron bed, clutching his head in his hand as if in despair. If there were any question as to the mental anguish portrayed here, Johns has stamped an emphatic 'Regrets, Jasper Johns' on each piece. The series, the latest from the renowned but elusive artist, is also titled 'Regrets.' " Johns' based the series on a photograph owned by Francis Bacon that pictures fellow painter Lucian Freud "perched on the quilt-covered bed and hiding his face in his hand, newspapers at his feet."

Alfredo Gisholt is a painter of “pictures,” a rarity in today's art world. Unabashed in his embrace of the history of painting, Gisholt paints timeless, poetic worlds where the everyday and the grand tradition of painting merge. Gisholt and I discussed his recent work via email on the occasion of his exhibition Canto General, currently on view at the CUE Art Foundation. -- Brett Baker

Painters’ Table (PT): You wear your influences on your sleeve, quoting forms from Picasso, Goya, and John Walker, to name a few. For instance, in several works a version of Goya’s Straw Mannequin is flung atop huddled masses of both gestural and appropriated forms. The mannequins, Picasso-like birds, and sheep skulls that appear in your work are very overt allusions. Their inclusion seems to mourn the disappearing tradition of imaginative picture-making while much painting today is heavily invested in theory and/or materials. Are your works critiques of contemporary painting?

AG: No, they are not a critique. I don't like to think of my painting in those terms. I have always felt that theory does not make for very good painting. In fact, it gets in the way of it. And neither does pushing material around. Painting has always felt inclusive to me - it does more than just address this one thing or this other thing. Rembrandt leaves nothing out.

All the painters you mention, and there are others, are very important to me. For years I have drawn in front of their paintings as a way of seeing them. These drawings, which I make on my sketchbook, find themselves becoming a part of the language of my paintings. After I draw them I feel I somehow own them. It is the same with a plant or a skull. Plus, I have never been afraid of influences. I also surround myself with the things I paint - a tipped over trash can, a leftover piece of steel, a lantern, etc. - and when you put all of it together there are going to be allusions. I like being a part of painting's history and welcome it in my studio.

Alfredo Gisholt: Studio View (courtesy of the artist)

PT: Your work made me think of the famous Guston quote about the studio being populated with all of the artist’s influences - “friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas.” The artist bids farewell to each, and to himself in the course of working. At the end only the painting remains. Your paintings, however, seem to have invited these influences back again, gathered them together in a heap on the studio floor. As a viewer I get the feeling these paintings are about what creates us; they suggest that the sources of our being are too meaningful to be discarded. That’s an important statement to make with a painting, yet it’s also one that risks sentimentality.

AG: I really like that description of them. I don't understand why sentiment has become a bad word in painting. It is important for me to feel something as I paint and somehow evidence that emotion. It is a great ambition to make paint do that - Goya does. Maybe that is where meaning comes from.

A few years ago I stood in front of a large Olmec head. It had a very powerful presence - not an illusion of something, it felt real. Not too long after, I came across a small Rembrandt painting of the Deposition of Christ - it reminded me of the head I saw. It was a cluster of figures. I came back to the studio and started painting a group of figures and wanted them to feel like the Olmec head. More recently De Kooning has been a powerful presence in my studio after the show at MOMA. He titled the painting "Attic" because it had everything one would find in the attic. I put as much stuff in a painting as I think is needed to say something bigger than the objects or forms in it. Diego, my oldest son, is always asking me why I paint the dump. I tell him that Guston did it too.

Chris Miller reviews an exhibition of paintings by Peri Schwartz at Perimeter Gallery, Chicago, on view through February 28, 2014.

Miller writes: "Schwartz’s rectangular containers are tightly ordered, but still there’s a restless quality suggesting that she’s never quite satisfied with them. What really excites Schwartz is the studio—a large, high-ceilinged workspace. Daylight pours in from the window, and it’s humming with activity... It’s these views of the studio executed in either oil or charcoal that are the highlights of this show. She joyfully measures space, tone and color in dynamic, large flat patterns, much as Richard Diebenkorn once did. The space may feel wide open, but it also converges toward the center."

As part of his series "In Process," Paul Behnke posts a photo blog documenting the development of a new painting by Valerie Brennan.

As noted in the press release for her recent exhibition No Chance of Rain at Giampietro Gallery, New Haven: "For Brennan every panel is an adventure in paint. The images are often the result of a struggle between the artist and her materials. Her work is rooted in the physical act of painting itself, exploring its natural process."

Painters' Table

About Painters' Table

Edited by artist Brett Baker, Painters' Table highlights writing from the painting blogosphere as it is published and serves as a platform for exploring blogs that focus primarily on the subject of painting.